My thanks to Anny for posting me twice on Halvard’s blogspot -
http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.it/2014/11/max-richards_7.html
and the second is a piece I’d otherwise have sent this week to poetryetc - she remarks:
I had to publish your other Seattle poem on the Day of the Dead on another page:
http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.it/2014/11/max-richards.html
Thanks again, Anny and behind her, Halvard.
Cheap
My frugal friend Norman
resolved to live like Thoreau
though employed where I was,
both on decent salaries.
Norman taught inter alia
American literature,
including Walden,
sometimes with me.
He’d bring me some trifle
by Cummings or Williams -
now isn’t that fine!
Mostly read Victorians,
the more forgotten
the better for him.
Their plots were passed
on in any chat with him.
He deplored how little
we asked of students.
Meeting a new bunch
one year he said:
for me please write
a short essay each week.
Most of his students
transferred to me.
Some also preferred
chairs and a table
to the benches he made
from scrap planks of wood
on which he served acrid
tea in mugs from op-shops.
His weatherboard cottage
was a short bike ride away.
Every room was full of books,
with many underfoot.
Front and back, grass grew long
around his self-sown trees.
It was wild! He looked wild,
gleaming through his beard.
His clothes were from charity
shops, ill-fitting and worn.
A day came when he confided:
‘I now buy op-shop underpants,
very cheap.’ Only he could wear
dead men’s undergarments.
What he didn’t spend
he made sure good causes got,
confidentially. He did let on
he’d bought land -
acres not farmable
down Gippsland way,
a train trip and a bike ride.
He wanted it reforested,
trees no-one would harvest.
As he aged he visited them
seldom. Last chat we had
he said the farmer next door
had taken the land off
his hands, very cheap.
Privately I called him
‘our cut-price Thoreau’.
Tread lightly - that he did.
I nurtured his wedding gift,
a gum-tree sapling
in an old tin, but it died.
|